Electric Wheels

Before there were automobiles, people needed a way to travel beyond walking distance in the growing city of Chicago, and in fact in cities and towns everywhere.  Public transportation systems filled and continue to fill that need. Chicago’s first public transportation was furnished by horse drawn omnibuses, beginning in the 1840s.  In 1859, an adaptation of the omnibuses, namely horse-drawn streetcars, began operating on the streets of Chicago.  As the city expanded, so did the system of horse-drawn streetcars. In 1882, a similar horse-drawn streetcar system was opened in Aurora. Horses were an expensive energy source and other propulsion systems were considered or implemented.   In 1882, cable-drawn streetcars (just like San Francisco’s cable cars) were introduced to Chicago, and within a short time Chicago had the largest cable car network in the world.

Everything changed one spring day in 1888, when Frank Julian Sprague demonstrated the first technically and commercially viable system of electrically powered streetcars. So successful was the new technology, that nearly every city or town clamored to inaugurate electric streetcar systems.  The Town of Cicero was among the enthusiastic aspirants.  Local real estate developers, Cicero’s E. A. Cummings in particular, saw the opening of streetcar routes as a way to provide public transit service to the various subdivisions where they sought to sell lots. 

To that end Cummings incorporated the Cicero and Proviso Street Railway to operate through present day Oak Park.   In that same year he incorporated the Ogden Street Railway to provide service in present-day Berwyn, along Ogden Avenue.   Also in 1891, wires were strung over the streetcar tracks in Aurora, facilitating electric propulsion in that Fox River community.   

Stanley Avenue @ Grove Avenue in Berwyn

The depression of 1893 and other circumstances delayed opening of the Ogden Street Railway until 1896.  The south Berwyn route didn’t run on Ogden Avenue as planned, but rather followed the CB&Q railroad tracks on 26^th Street, Ridgeland Avenue and Stanley Avenue to Harlem Avenue.  The following year the route was extended south and west via Harlem Avenue and Ogden Avenue to Lyons.

Ran between Cicero, Riverside, Grossdale and La Grange

La Grange real estate interests incorporated a second company, the Suburban Railroad, to provide transit service extending west through Cicero, Riverside, Grossdale (later renamed Brookfield), La Grange, and beyond.  The franchise would allow the company to extend to Elgin, Aurora, and Joliet, through those extensions never materialized.  Service was opened to La Grange in 1897. 

The 1905, opening of Cicero’s massive Hawthorne Works provided a ridership bonanza for both companies.  Another ridership source for the Berwyn and Lyons route were the Lyons taverns.  Most communities in the vicinity were “dry,” namely that serving of alcoholic beverages was prohibited.  Streetcars were filled to capacity on warm summer evenings with thirsty patrons travelling to and from the Lyons Taverns.  George Hofmann’s Niagara Park along the Des Plaines River in Lyons was an especially popular destination.   Later, in 1934, the Brookfield Zoo opened with the La Grange streetcar line stopping at the Zoo’s front door.  The company ran extra cars on weekends to carry Zoo visitors.

Brookfield Zoo South Entrance

The original entrepreneurs sold out the legendary Chicago transit financier Charles Tyson Yerkes, who sought to direct the streetcars to stations on his Lake Street Elevated Railroad, that had opened to Laramie Avenue in 1894.  Following Yerkes departure from Chicago in 1901, the Ogden and Suburban routes endured precarious financial circumstances until reorganization and consolidation with the Cicero & Proviso routes in 1913.  The new company, Chicago & West Towns Railways, a.k.a. the “West Towns,” operated the streetcar system and subsequent bus network until the early 1980s.

Fallout from those early 1900’s financial tribulations, was the 1910 “Settlement Ordinance” whereby the Chicago streetcar operations were separated from the those in the suburbs.  That situation lasts to this day.  CTA transit routes operate only to the city limits.  Suburban buses are operated by Pace Suburban bus system.

West Towns streetcar routes between Cicero, Lyons, and La Grange

Through the 1920s, the West Towns added short extensions to various of its routes, though by then most system expansion was through the use of gasoline and then diesel-powered motor buses.  The West Towns streetcar network reached its apogee in 1931, with a mile-long extension along 35^th Street in Cicero.  In 1933, shrinkage of the system began with truncation of the Berwyn-Lyons line to Harlem and Ogden Avenues, to accommodate a highway construction project along Ogden Avenue.  The remainder of that route was converted to bus operation in 1940.  The Aurora streetcar system was converted to bus operation in 1934.

In April 1948, the last West Towns streetcar service, on the Cermak – La Grange (former Suburban Railway) route, was converted to bus operation.  Final streetcar operation in the towns along the Q occurred in 1951, when the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) discontinued streetcar operation on Cicero Avenue through Chicago and Cicero, past the big Western Electric Hawthorne Works.

Electrically powered rail cars still operate through part of Cicero.  CTA’s Pink Line, part of the overall rapid transit (‘L’) network.   The Pink Line got its start when in 1896, the Metropolitan West Side Elevated Railroad opened it's Douglas Park route to a point near 22^nd Street (now Cermak Road) and Western Avenue in the city of Chicago.  The route was extended out past the Hawthorne Works in Cicero in 1907, and subsequently extended through Cicero and Berwyn to Oak Park Avenue in 1924.   In 1952, the route was truncated to its present terminal at 54^th Avenue in Cicero.

Careful examination of the landscape in the towns along the Q reveals some evidence of the streetcars that ran though several communities.   Traffic lanes on Monroe Avenue and Lincoln Avenue, and Broadway in Brookfield, along with Des Plaines Avenue and Woodside Road in Riverside, have separated traffic lanes.   Streetcar used to run down the center of those streets on a “center reservation.”  Likewise concrete bridge pilings in the Des Plaines River remain from the former bridge over that waterway.

West Towns streetcar preserved at Illinois Railway Museum

 “Electric wheels,” in the form of streetcar service and the ‘L” have operated through the towns along the Q for 121 years.   One West Towns streetcar and many historic CTA ‘L’ cars are preserved at the Illinois Railway Museum in Union, Illinois.